When it first came out, I thought it was cool but wasn't blown away by it, and so never did really get into it (and to be fair, I've never been much of an HDR guy to begin with). But this new version is not only easier to get great results from, in many cases it also gives great results without doing any adjustments at all. And to me that's what makes it really cool.

There are some very impressive new features that I'll need to spend some significant time with to really wrap my head around (the luminosity mask tool is extremely cool) and I may even kick off a Live Training series based on this, but overall I think this is quite a nice upgrade.

DISCLAIMER: I was hired by Macphun to create a promo video, which you can see below, so I am definitely biased in this. But watch my full video below where I explore and open a series of sequences and judge for yourself! Also if you choose to pre-order, I will earn an affiliate fee — so if you're buying, please buy here! Thanks ;-)

My promotional video

Here's the promotional “What's New” video I made for Macphun:

Let's see it in action!

This is the “Video Tip” I just recorded. This video is included for free members and non-members alike because of my obvious bias and affiliate connection. Enjoy!

Joseph, Definitely waiting for you do a whole set of training sessions on this app! I have Aurora Pro and got an email from them and upgraded before I got to your webpage :-(. I’ll email them and see if I can give you some credit for my upgrade. Anyway, looking forward form more form you on this app.

Hi Joseph - thanks for producing the “new features” video and this tour de force walkthrough of the beta software! I enjoyed the “live” aspect of your presentation. My favorite part was brushing in the Tone Curve adjustment… super-cool.

Thomas, That’s strange. I ordered mine directly from an email I got from macphun since I already owned Aurora Pro. In my case it was an upgrade. But I just tried ordering from this site and got to the order page which was in USD. ? Reboot and retry? Worse case scenario, try emailing Kevin LaRue directly (kevin@macphun.com). He’s been absolutely super in helping me with all of macphun’s products. Customer service has never been a problem for me with them. They’re a great company to deal with.

Hi Thomas - I’m assuming your residence ANDIP address of your Mac is in the U.S. (sorry, had to ask! ;).

When you go to the website, you should see a U.S. Flag in the upper right corner and all currencies on the page should read $89. When you click the Upgrade link and begin the verification process, that flag should remain. Once verified, the product is placed in our shopping cart, which also should say $89 and have a “tag” in the upper right that spells out United States.

Are you seeing all of that BUT the price is in Canadian dollars? If so, frankly I wouldn’t place the order. Simply write a quick note to support@macphun.com and they can help - they may have a direct link that bypasses some of the region checking for all I know. Sounds like if you’re seeing USD on our site and all the way thru, but the cart is showing CAD, then it’s a problem w/ our third-party cart. In any case, the Support team is still the best course of action.

Hi Thomas - one last thing: FastSpring said that in order to troubleshoot the Canadian dollars issue, they would need to trace your IP address. I’ve opened up a support ticket (#85932) so if you’d like to pursue this further, simply email support@fastspring.com and they can work directly with you. Thanks! Kevin

My Aurora HDR Pro appears to be broken after installing Sierra …… does this mean everyone HAS to upgrade? Where is the support for this product? MacPhun seems to have washed their hands of it and redirects to AuroraHDR website where there is no support ….. not so Phun.

Dai, I have not upgraded to macOS Sierra yet. But there was a recent upgrade to Aurora Pro. Did you upgrade? It think it is 1.2.7 (2719). It just came out recently, so maybe it has something to do with Sierra. I have emailed support@macphun.com with a question on another of their applications and got a quick response in the past. If you haven’t tried that route I would suggest doing so.

After upgrading to OSX Sierra my Aurora HDR Pro auto-crashed every time it started up so the “Check for Upgrades” was inaccessible. The MacPhun website Aurora tab sends you off to a separate Aurora website with no Support.

I have now found the link on the MacPhun page to request your registration key and re-download the latest Aurora HDR Pro 1.2.7 which works fine on Sierra.

Today I received the new Aurora 2017. Will have to admit that that at first I was not going purchase Aurora 2017 because of all the issues I had with the last version. The performance was very slow. In fact it would take nearly 9 minutes just to export 3 Sony Raw (42mb) images from Lightroom to Aurora. Almost the same time frame after clicking on apply for return to Lightroom.

Now fast forward to Aurora 2017. After testing a few images this morning I found the performance to be good. Exporting from Lightroom CC, three Sony Raw (42mb) images took under 45 seconds. After processing return took about the same time. Single image processing seems to be even faster. Editing images with Aurora also seems to be much faster with no real hang ups.

Stuart, That’s great to hear. I downloaded Aurora 2017 this evening. I had two issues that I will relay here for those who might be following this Tip in case they run into something similar. A2017 downloaded fine and immediately appeared on my dock. But I did not get the usual Mac app download routine of opening it and draggind the icon of the downloaded app into Applications. I also found out that the Installl plugins was gray out when I clicked on Aurora 2017 on the top menu bar. So i went to Finder>Downloads and found A2017 and copied it to my desktop then dragged it into my Applications folder. I then uploaded the sample pictures provided with A2017 and low and behold the Install Plugins option was now active. I tested it by opening Lr and there it was. So, if anyone has this problem on download this is the solution that should work. Now to begin to really test drive this app! Looking forward to Joseph’s Live video in a couple of weeks on Aurora 2017.

Thanks for the run-down of that experience Florian. I’ll pass that back to the engineers. We used to do the “drag to a application folder” installer and have most recently switched over to simply delivering a .zip file. I’m not sure why but I’ll ask.